José Pedro Ferreira1+, Margarita Correia1,2, Gladis de Barcellos Almeida3, Inês Machungo4
1CELGA-ILTEC, PT; 2U. Lisbon, PT; 3Federal U. of São Carlos, SP, BR; 4U. Eduardo Mondlane, MZ

Developing the first official linguistic resources for non-dominant varieties of Portuguese

Keywords: Portuguese, linguistic resources, language policy, spelling reform.

Until recently, every linguistic resource for Portuguese was based in the legally separated written standard varieties of either Brazil or Portugal. This century-old separation was based not only on diverse linguistic traits, but also on differing, legally binding, national level spellings used in each of the two countries. Every other Portuguese-speaking nation followed the spelling rules of Portugal, set up before the decolonization process over 40 years ago. The difficult spelling agreement was reached by the (then seven) Portuguese-speaking countries 25 years ago, but was only effectively implemented in recent years, owing to complex political motivations with strong sociolinguistic implications.

The requirement to develop an officially mandated project that materializes the end of that legal separation, the first Common Spelling Wordlist (Vocabulário Ortográfico Comum da Língua Portuguesa - VOC) for Portuguese, set the opportunity not only to integrate the lexicon in use in Brazil and Portugal, but also to develop founding linguistic resources for many previously under-represented varieties of Portuguese. VOC is being developed in the context of a supranational diplomatic organization, the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), following a common framework and methodology agreed-upon by every member-state.

The project was thought of and developed to be a cornerstone of a new, pluri-centric approach for the linguistic policy of Portuguese, necessarily representing every country on an ideally equal standing. In the process, over the past few years, a set of national teams have been developing the first large-scale corpora and lexical inventories for the Portuguese spoken and written in countries such as Cape Verde, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Timor-Leste, following an agreed-upon common framework and methodology applied by a small coordinating team. The development of the project entailed many nuances and design choices tailored for each country, reflecting the current national dynamics and internal sociolinguistic perception of each specific variety of Portuguese (e.g., based on existing resources for dominant varieties, corpus-based for those in an apparent endonormative stabilization process, or with a more traditional lexicographic approach for others).

This paper outlines the dynamic linguistic situation and sociolinguistic and political attitudes in each of these countries and the different options they motivated in VOC. We try to track the reality imperatives and political and sociolinguistic reasons underlying those differing design choices and the reactions they caused under diplomatic and political pressure to adopt or reject equal, one-size-fits-all solutions for every country. We aim to provide the audience with a brief outline of the current dynamic situation in countries with ND varieties of Portuguese, describe the impact of a common legal status change over the political standing of each variety in a pluri-centric language-based diplomatic community, and show the implications of different linguistic situations for the development of common resources.